The Wayback Machine is a helpful tool for finding missing blog posts from past years

I’m in the process of restoring some posts to this blog, posts that were published several years ago but for some reason did not make it to this WordPress site from a previous platform. From something I wrote at the time I realize I was aware of the situation then and indicated I might one day get around to restoring the those files that had not made the transition.

(By the way, for those people who read this blog via a feed reader, I apologize for a post that just went out by mistake. Headed “Business Blogging at Ballina Lunch Time Seminar”, it was actually a post from almost four years ago, which I was endeavouring to reinstate, but neglected to put the old date in before I hit “Publish”.)

I would probably not have been concerned about restoring the old posts, except for the problem I’ve just noticed of links to those old posts showing up with a “page Not Found” error message.

Perhaps a tad quixotically, but hopefully also in the interest of not having this site’s ranking penalized some time in the future for too many “page not found” results, I set out to restore the missing posts.

To do that I used the amazing “Wayback Machine” at Archive.org, the wonderful not-for-profit site which, as the name suggests, archives a whole lot of content from the web.  Including, happily for me, old posts of mine and even pre-blogging versions of my past websites, back to the mid 1990s.

So when I look up the records for http://deswalsh.com I get results going back to 2003, before this was in blog format. There are no results after 2008 for this or for other of my sites: according to the Archive.org site data from that time has been saved but has not yet been indexed for display.

If you would like more information about the restoration process and how to do that so as not to create search engine confusion, please let me know via the comments or the Contact page.

Des Walsh

Business coach and digital entrepreneur. With coach training from Coachville.com and its Graduate School of Coaching, and a founding member of the International Association of Coaching, Des has been coaching business owners and entrepreneurs for the past 20 years. Over the same period he has also been actively engaged in promoting the business opportunities of the digital economy. He is a certified Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) coach, and a certified specialist in social media strategy and affiliate marketing.